Subalterns, Rebels, and Outcastes:

Explorations in Modern Indian History

Introduction: In the early 1980s, there emerged in India
a 'school' of history that goes by the name of 'Subaltern Studies';
this 'school' has now gained a world-wide reputation, and 'Subaltern
Studies' is beginning to make its influence felt in Latin American
Studies, African Studies, 'cultural studies', and other arenas.
Where previously the history of modern India, and particularly
of the nationalist movement, was etched as a history of Indian
'elites', now this history is being construed primarily as a history
of 'subaltern groups'. How are we to think about subalterns?
Who and what are the 'subalterns', and how did this military
term begin to be used as the center-piece of a body of work on
resistance? We will begin with a consideration of the original
problematic of subaltern histories and then ask how such histories
can be written. What are the problems of writing such histories?
'Subaltern Studies', viewed as a collective enterprise, represents
the most significant achievement of South Asian 'cultural studies';
it has effectively contested what were until recently the dominant
interpretations of Indian history, and more generally it has provided
a framework within which to contest the dominant modes of knowledge.
However, subaltern history has not always had an easy relationship
with feminism, and we will also interrogate the place of feminism
within subaltern history. Feminist historiography, more than
anything else, has brought questions of voice, agency, and resistance
to the fore, and in this connection we will look at an oral history
of women in the Telengana uprising, and some articles drawn from
a recent anthology on constructions of womanhood and women in
colonial India. The course will, in the final weeks, move to
debates among subaltern historians, and a consideration of the
argument that Subaltern Studies has been contaminated by post-modernism.
Finally, we will ask: how do subaltern historians write histories
of 'great men'? Does subaltern history condemn us to writing
only of the history of this or that rebellion, this or that oppressed
group? Are only fragmentary narratives possible, or is it possible
to write a history of the nationalist movement as a whole, and
if so, does that necessarily become a master narrative? The course
will conclude with a discussion of Ashis Nandy's The Intimate
Enemy, not a work belonging to the Subaltern School, but one
of the most significant works on colonial India nonetheless; and
we shall be interested particularly in attempting to locate it
in relation to subaltern history.

Course material: All material on the syllabus will be
placed on reserve in the college library. There will a reader
for the course; any articles in the syllabus not found in the
reader, or any one of the books ordered for you, will also be
on 2-hour reserve. Items in the reader are indicated by a R
in bold letters. The following books have been ordered at ASUCLA
for your purchase (all Oxford books are Delhi, Oxford University
Press, unless otherwise stated):

Requirements: As this is a seminar, your active participation
is not merely expected and desirable, but indispensable. The
only formal requirement is a paper which should be not less than
twenty pages long. You may either tackle some of the books in
the course and write a critical piece -- for example, you
could discuss some of the achievements, shortcomings, or possibilities
of subaltern historiography, or you could write on the discrepancies
between feminist and subaltern histories -- or you can do a research
paper, which would undoubtedly require some additional reading.
You could look at the relation between subaltern history and
what is more generally termed 'history from below'; you could
consider the configurations of class in subaltern history, in
relation to E.P. Thompson's work on class; or you could interrogate
subaltern history by using Carlo Ginzburg's work on microhistory.
The possibilities are infinite. This paper will be due by the
Friday of the last week of classes.

Weeks 2:Aims and Limits of Subaltern Historiography:
The Programmatic Notes and the 'New' Collaborationist History

Ranajit Guha, "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial
India", and "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency",
both in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. R. Guha and Gayatri
Spivak (New York: Oxford, 1988).

Gyan Prakash, "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the
Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography",
CSSH 32, 2 (April 1990):383-408; also published in revised
form as "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third
World: Indian Historiography Is Good to Think", in Colonialism
and Culture, ed. Nicholas Dirks (Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan
Press, 1992), pp. 353-88. R [CSSH: Comparative Studies
in Society and History]

Vinay Lal, "On the Perils of Historical Thinking: The Case,
Puzzling as Usual, of India." Journal of Commonwealth
and Postcolonial Studies 3 (1996); revised version in Journal
of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research (1996). R